Upcoming Events

Date: Wed, Apr 9
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Room: GFS 330

Andrew Simpson & Zhixian Huang: “The Complexities of OV/VO Word Order in Wu Chinese”

Date: Fri, Apr 11
Time: 10:00am – 11:20am
Room: GFS 330

Phoenix Wang (PHIL): “How do moral perception and attention converge?”

Abstract:
Moral perception is the phenomenon whereby the human perceptual system detects and uses morally relevant or salient features, in at least some situations, to feed downstream cognition. Given this broad understanding, a ‘moral perceiver’ is one who perceptually represents moral properties or features in their environment. More substantially, attentional processes are critical in directing our perceptual awareness toward specific cues among many competitors. Understanding how attention mediates and synchronizes the utility of perceptually and morally salient features in our daily lives—particularly one special kind of attention, which I call stimulus-driven attention, and which is tuned to detect salient perceptible features and moral properties—can provide valuable insight into substantive cases of moral perception. I argue that this sheds light on how ‘perceiving visually’ and ‘perceiving morally’ converge in moral perception.
In the most recent debate on moral perception (sometimes referred to as the ‘moral pop-out effect,’ i.e., Gantman & Van Bavel, 2014), Firestone and Scholl (2016) reject the idea that perception, properly understood, has anything directly to do with generating the moral recognition of wrongness or rightness (moral badness or goodness) in most alleged cases. In fact, moral perception is a misnomer. On this deflationary view, the phenomena used to motivate ‘moral perception’ reflect neither visual perception nor morality, let alone their interaction. However, it is unnecessarily strong to conclude that moral perception is not a real phenomenon. In rebutting the deflationary view, I claim that there is a real phenomenon of moral perception that involves properly perceptual processing of moral properties. Specifically, I propose a new view which I call Hybrid Moral Perception (HMP). This new account addresses the main criticism of the deflationary view regarding whether moral perception is a genuine phenomenon and provides explanations for why moral perception is properly perceptual, particularly in visual perception, as well as properly moral, through pertinent philosophical cases.

Date: Mon, Apr 14
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Room: GFS 330

Darby Grachek: TBA

Date: Tue, Apr 15
Time: 9:30am – 10:30am
Room: GFS 330

Hailin Hao: “Contextualizing Uniform Information Density (UID)”